derFunkenstein wrote:What's totally fantastic is that you (well, I, anyway) can't see the loop point. It's continuous, which is totally awesome.

If we had +1 functionality here, you'd get one from me. I agree. People have been making "intentionally looped" animated gifs for a while, but here, the lack of a clear repeat point, and the absolute stillness of the rest of the image (especially when there's a person being still) makes it rather fascinating to look at.

It seems that the loop usually consists of the image being played forward at normal speed, and halfway through being rewound to the beginning of the footage. Some of the rewinding in the images is sped up if the motion in the photo needs to look spontaneous (giving the effect of a gust of wind in some).

That's a very neat effect, assuming the artist uses it correctly. I notice on the first linked page that some of the creations were flirting with the Uncanny Valley because hair was blowing on one side of a model's head but not the other, or one person was engaged in motions that weren't matched by an assistant in the same image, leading to that subtle feeling that something was very wrong.